Ibrahim Dagher

About Ibrahim Dagher

Ibrahim Dagher was born in the Bronx of New York City, and at the age of five he and his family moved to California’s Central Valley, where they would find a permanent home in the city of Modesto. His parents, two devout Muslims from Lebanon, were the first immigrants to the United States in each of their families. 

As a New American, Ibrahim spent his childhood between California’s arid valleys and Lebanon’s humid coasts. Every summer he visited extended family in the villages of Lebanon and deepened his connection to Islam in local mosques. During the school year, Ibrahim led the daily Pledge of Allegiance, competed in speech fairs and debate tournaments, and learned—the hard way—how to fast for Ramadan in California’s 100-degree weather.

Having seen Lebanon’s corrupt sectarian system first-hand and heard stories of how his parents had been treated under the Israeli occupation, Ibrahim was raised with a deep appreciation for the law. In August 2019, as a high school senior, Ibrahim moved to Beirut for a year to help family. In October of that year, protests and a revolution swept across Lebanon, calling for governmental resignations and constitutional reforms. Ultimately, the constitutional efforts failed, but what Ibrahim witnessed that year inspired him to explore more deeply what ideas ground the American constitutional system.

Upon returning to the US, Ibrahim studied philosophy and political science at the University of California, Davis. Enthralled by philosophy, and how its analytical method could be used to elucidate bedrock concepts, Ibrahim took graduate seminars, spoke at conferences, and published several papers in moral philosophy and metaphysics, including in top journals like Philosophia and Synthese. His thesis, also in metaphysics, won several university prizes and was published in IJPR. 

Ibrahim also led initiatives at Davis to give students opportunities to think about the law and what grounds it—he founded and led Davis’ Moot Court team, expanded legal writing opportunities as editor-in-chief of the Davis Vanguard, coached a debate team, and even created Let’s Learn Logic, an education website dedicated to producing free symbolic logic courses.

After graduating summa cum laude, Ibrahim is currently pursuing a JD/PhD at Yale University, where he is pursuing research at the intersection of law and philosophy, hoping to elucidate what balance of values undergirds the US Constitution, how it ought to be interpreted by judges, and how philosophical method can move the law forward.